On this, the 80th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, I thought that it might be interesting to look one year forward to gauge how the US responded to the attack. On December 7, 1942, American shipyards launched 25 ships, 15 for the US Navy, including the aircraft carrier USS Bunker Hill and the 45,000-ton battleship USS New Jersey. The British Movietone newsreel below described the launchings on Pearl Harbor Day in 1942 as “only a fraction of Roosevelt’s mathematical certainty of the fate in store for Japan.”
Launching Of Aircraft Carrier Bunker Hill and Battleship New Jersey
Despite the view by many that the Pearl Harbor attack struck the death knell for battleships, the New Jersey went on to have a long and storied career. During World War II, New Jersey shelled targets on Guam and Okinawa, and screened aircraft carriers conducting raids in the Marshall Islands. During the Korean War, she was involved in raids up and down the North Korean coast, after which she was decommissioned.
She was briefly reactivated in 1968 and sent to Vietnam to support US troops before returning to the mothball fleet in 1969. Reactivated once more in the 1980s as part of the 600-ship Navy program, New Jersey was modernized to carry missiles and recommissioned for service. In 1983, she participated in US operations during the Lebanese Civil War.
The USS New Jersey is now a museum ship in Camden, New Jersey. Here is a video from a year ago about the construction and launching of the USS New Jersey narrated by the museum’s curator, Ryan Szimanski.
We toured the USS Iowa in San Pedro a few years back. An impressive ship. She still had the missile launching placements on her. I might go again if I have the chance.